The disclosure generally relates to content storage systems, and in particular it relates to representations of data objects in content storage systems.
As computing systems increase in scale and reach, the requirement to be able to reliably access stored data from multiple locations and at high rates has increased in importance. When computing systems were first introduced into the business environment, they were centralized into one facility, and accessed in a very controlled environment. With the introduction of networking and WAN technologies, distributed processing began to be adopted as computing resources could be spread across multiple facilities, and across multiple computing resources within a given facility. In the early 1980's the “File Server” became a widely deployed technology, led by Novell Netware, and provided location independence of data storage, in that an employee or user could access their files and data from any computer connected to the file server. By storing data centrally instead of on each individual computer, many problems were solved, including data portability, reliability (the file servers could be made more reliable), and economies of scale were introduced, as the storage resources on the file server could be shared across many users, and common infrastructure for backup could be leveraged.
Despite these advantages, centralized file servers have many disadvantages, including issues involving network disconnections resulting in loss of accessibility to stored data, single points of failure that could result in data loss, and scalability challenges in handling larger data volumes.